Snowden has actually said he would go before a jury of peers, in an open trial. The problem is that he faces a military trial, behind closed doors, with no actual representation. So this public statement really is a huge farce.

The only thing that's amazing about this is that I got email spam about this new "development possibility" before the story was even on slashdot (yes, I have bad spam filters). It's so ridiculous how companies apparently think that it's ok to send unsolicited email just because my address shows up on google play for an android app. Avoid at all cost is therefore my take-away.

Hi,
I'm the "typical" white male in CS gradschool. My subjective view is that CS has one of the lowest number of women compared to other STEM disciplines. I'd estimate that typically there are about 5% tops in classes or at conferences. For various reasons I think that this situation is a shame for the community and society as a whole. What do you think can be done to improve this?

Thanks!

I think that's really an unfair comparison. Do other agencies have the insane funding that NSA has? The lack of accountability (and by that I mean they don't have to justify their spend as much). Also, as the article noted, the NSA is except from these pay scales.

And this goes to show that you missed the points of the report. Most federal agencies are forbidden from paying decent wages because they have to use the pay scales that the government sets.

If you want to make the point that the government pays shit, then you should phrase that differently...

The anonymous submitter has a very different idea of what constitutes significant than I do... 7% girls may be infinitely more than 0, but is still not very much over all!

Turns out Schwarzeneggger isn't the only Austrian dude out there who ended up in government in another country...

I really like my Lenovo T-series laptop. Sure, it may not live up to the legendary build quality back when it was an IBM, but it is still pretty good. It has all the user replacement options that are standard, a good keyboard and screen. It's not getting an award for its looks, but well, who cares.

While the article may not have very diplomatic wording, the essence is true: I installed Linux Mint about a year ago, and liked it. But I had to switch to a different distribution after a couple of months because there were virtually NO updates coming in at all. I'd say that Ubuntu updates like crazy, but no updates at all in several months makes it very likely that they just don't have enough manpower to provide such a service. And that does make your distribution vulnerable. My experience may be outdated, but I'd bet it's still the same given this article...

> AMD/ATI also has introduced MANTLE Api for lower level access than DirectX which is cross platform. This may turn into a very important API as AMD/ATI have their GPUs in the next generation Sony and Xbox consoles as well with a large marketshare for game developers to target

I read somewhere that that's unfortunately not true; Mantle will not be available for the new Xbox or Playstation. My speculation is that Microsoft and Sony don't actually want to be THAT compatible as it would make porting too easy...